The fake Le Soir

At about 4 p.m. on 9 November 1943 bundles of the afternoon daily Le Soir arrived at several dozen kiosks in Brussels. It looked just as it always did: the same masthead, the same typeface, the same column layout. Readers who began leafing through it on their way to the tram, however, soon realised that they were holding something quite different. It was a fake issue – known in Belgium ever since as the “Faux Soir” – produced by the resistance as a parody of the newspaper that had served German propaganda since 1940. Under the guise of sober commentary it poked fun at German defeats on the Eastern Front, at the air raids on the Reich and at Adolf Hitler himself.

The operation was not an armed strike and no one died in it, but it became one of the best-known episodes of the Belgian resistance. For occupied Belgium it was proof that even under the occupier’s nose it was possible to pull off something the whole country could laugh at.

The “stolen” daily

Before the war Le Soir had been one of the most widely read French-language dailies in Belgium. After the German attack of 10 May 1940 it ceased publication on 18 May, and after the capitulation of the Belgian army and the occupation of the country it was relaunched with the occupier’s consent. The editorial office was taken over by journalists willing to collaborate with the Germans, among them the writer Horace Van Offel and the commentator Raymond De Becker. The paper was censored by the German propaganda section attached to the military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen and repeated Wehrmacht communiqués and the slogans of the “New Order” in Europe. Belgians called it “Le Soir volé” – the “stolen Soir”.

Even so, the paper sold well; according to Belgian studies its circulation was around 300,000 copies. People read it for local news, advertisements and supplements. It was in its pages that Hergé published Tintin’s adventures during the occupation, including The Shooting Star.

From the first months of the occupation the collaborationist press was opposed by underground papers. La Libre Belgique was revived; it had already appeared clandestinely during the First World War, mocking the German occupiers. The Independence Front (Front de l’Indépendance) – an organisation founded in 1941 on Communist initiative but bringing together people of various persuasions, from the Catholic priest André Roland to the journalist Fernand Demany – published, according to Belgian studies, some 250 underground titles. It was from its circles that the idea of the fake Le Soir came.

The idea and the preparations

The idea was born on 19 October 1943. Marc Aubrion, an activist of the Independence Front, was preparing a text for 11 November, the anniversary of the 1918 armistice that had ended the First World War and the German occupation of Belgium. The Germans had banned the commemoration of this holiday, and Aubrion decided that the best way to mark it would be to make the occupier look ridiculous with his own newspaper. The next day he presented the plan to René Noël, head of the Front’s press department in Brabant and Hainaut. They had about three weeks to prepare.

The issue was originally to appear on the anniversary itself, but the date was moved to Tuesday 9 November. On Wednesdays Le Soir ran to four pages, whereas the underground could print only a single sheet. The money – 50,000 francs – was raised by the lawyer Andrée Grandjean, who found support from the businessman Alfred Fourcroy, who was also active in a network smuggling downed Allied airmen out of the country. The texts were written by, among others, Demany, the lawyer Pierre Ansiaux and the prosecutor Adrien van den Branden de Reeth. Théo Mullier, a member of the Front employed at Le Soir, supplied the matrix of the masthead and – what proved crucial – a list of the kiosks supplied directly by the paper, together with their delivery times.

The printing was handled by Ferdinand Wellens, owner of a printing works in the rue de Ruysbroeck in Brussels, who had printed for the underground before. He provided paper, compositors and machines, charging only a franc a copy. Over the weekend of 30 October – 1 November the Linotype operator Julien Oorlinckx set the whole issue, and on 6 and 7 November it was printed on a rotary press. According to Belgian studies the print run was 50,000 copies: about 5,000 were meant to be slipped into the kiosks, and the rest sold clandestinely at 10 francs each for the benefit of the Front. The copies were carefully trimmed to remove any marks by which the machine could be identified.

The day of the operation

The afternoon Le Soir reached the kiosks at around 4 p.m., when office workers and labourers on their way home from work were already waiting. The organisers wanted to delay the delivery of the real paper. They asked the British to send aircraft over Brussels to set off an air-raid alert, but received no reply. A plan to set fire to Le Soir’s delivery vans outside the editorial office also failed – the attempt was foiled by a passer-by who raised the alarm.

Nevertheless, at about 4 p.m. several dozen young distributors delivered bundles of a hundred copies, each wrapped in a band explaining that because of a machine breakdown the print run was smaller than usual. The paper sold out in no time. Some readers, having glanced at the front page, quickly folded it and put it in their pockets; in some trams someone read whole passages aloud. When the real delivery reached them, the newsagents could not hide their astonishment. Some stopped selling out of fear; others offered customers a choice between the real issue and the fake one.

What was inside

The front page carried two photographs instead of the usual one. The first showed bombers in flight, captioned as being “in the thick of the action” – an attentive reader could make out the stars of American B-17s on the wings. The second showed Hitler, hands on hips and eyes raised to the sky. An editorial note explained that the compositor had made a mistake and the two photographs ought to form a single whole: the Führer, hearing the “Flying Fortresses” overhead, utters the words “Das habe ich nicht gewollt” – “I did not want this” – with which, according to tradition, Kaiser Wilhelm II had disclaimed responsibility for the previous war.

The main articles imitated the convoluted style of the collaborationist military commentators, taking it to the point of absurdity. The author of a “strategic analysis” assured readers that the German General Staff had never for a moment lost control over the succession of the seasons, since the summer campaign had been followed by the autumn one, which would in turn be followed by the winter one, and that the German command furnished its rare comments with all the more reservations the fewer reserves it had. The paper mocked “elastic defence”, whose success was supposed to prove that the Reich was in no way short of rubber. A parody of a “German communiqué” reported that on the Eastern Front, despite significant changes, the situation remained unchanged, and that in the trapezium-shaped triangle Kremenchuk–Odessa–Dnipropetrovsk–Melitopol the troops were holding back the Soviets by the skilful manoeuvre of surrendering en masse. This was an allusion to real events of the autumn of 1943: in the Battle of the Dnieper the Red Army had forced the river and in October had taken Dnipropetrovsk and Melitopol. The small ads, obituaries and advertisements contained further jokes aimed at well-known collaborators, as well as allusions to the government-in-exile and to the approaching liberation.

The whole thing was in the spirit of zwanze, the mischievous popular humour of Brussels. It issued no call to arms and contained no political slogans, but for that very reason it reached people who read the “stolen Soir” every day.

Investigation and reprisals

According to the organisers’ accounts, the next day, 10 November, RAF aircraft did finally fly over Brussels – a day too late. The remaining copies were sold within a few days; collectors reportedly paid as much as 1,500–2,500 francs for them. Part of the print run was smuggled abroad, and reprints also circulated outside Belgium.

For the occupier it was a humiliation. The investigation was conducted by the Gestapo, which eventually identified the printing press – the marks had not been removed from every copy. According to Belgian studies, on 25 February 1944 Wellens, Mullier, Oorlinckx and the machine operator Henri Vandevelde were arrested; Wellens and Mullier died in deportation. Aubrion was arrested later too and sentenced to death, a sentence subsequently commuted to fifteen years’ imprisonment. In all, a dozen or so people were arrested, and the sentences passed on distributors and printers ranged from a few months to several years in prison.

Its place in the war

The fake Le Soir did not change the military situation, but it captures the mood of occupied Europe in the autumn of 1943 well. After Stalingrad, Kursk, Italy’s capitulation and the retreat from the Dnieper, German propaganda could no longer speak convincingly of victory, and its “defensive successes” had become a laughing stock. The Belgian government of Hubert Pierlot operated from London, relying among other things on the resources of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, where the burdens of war contributed to the Ruzagayura famine. In Belgium itself King Leopold III remained a prisoner at Laeken, while Léon Degrelle’s Rexists fought on the German side on the Eastern Front.

Belgium was liberated in September 1944, Brussels on 3 September. The real Le Soir was returned to its rightful owners, and its collaborationist editors were put on trial. The fake issue became an enduring symbol of Belgian resistance: in 1954 a film about it, Un soir de joie, was made, and in 1993, on the fiftieth anniversary of the operation, the Belgian post office issued a commemorative stamp.